Monk Quixote

I haven’t writ­ten any fic­tion for eight weeks now. I am a crea­ture of habit and rou­tine — and frag­ile ones at that. ‘What I do’ is shaped over sequences of days — three, usu­ally. After three days of doing some­thing I feel ‘this is what I do’. And then, if — as I fre­quently do — I for­get to keep going, I ‘reward’ myself with a break, or a dis­trac­tion. Only to find that the break and the dis­trac­tion are now ‘what I do’.

This is hardly a unique sit­u­a­tion — most, if not all, peo­ple will feel like this at some point, and it’s a recur­ring theme of my adult­hood. There are so many things, both cur­rent and past, that feel like I only ever did or do them to use up time. Not all of them are ‘fun’. Most are not exactly life-enhancing. At least now I’m gen­er­ally hap­pier they are not so overtly self-destructive or plain doo­fus. But like all habits, they become hard to break through sheer repetition.

As an aside — it’s prob­a­bly the lack of an over-arching reli­gious drive, or meta-habit, that causes this. If I were dri­ven by God, or greed, or injus­tice or what­ever, I imag­ine I would com­part­men­talise my life bet­ter — use one part as fuel for the other. Whereas in actu­al­ity it all bleeds into one mush of con­fu­sion and con­flict­ing emo­tions. I have too much time and head­space to fill with empty lit­tle rit­u­als and muscle-memory actions.

Speak­ing of muscle-memory…I some­times won­der what the men­tal equiv­a­lent of a phys­i­cal injury is. I don’t mean men­tal ill­ness, or depres­sion etc. But bruis­ing, or sprains, or you know — the stuff you just learn to deal with — for exam­ple, most years I will have sev­eral weeks when I can’t run at all due to an injured ankle, or knee. I get cross, and tetchy, and heav­ier. I lose the will to run. I lose speed, and the love of run­ning. And there must be an equiv­a­lent for the brain, but I have no idea what the symp­toms look like. Or rather, feel like.

I sus­pect my head is mildly sprained at present. And that I am not quite treat­ing it right. What is the equiv­a­lent of RICE for the head? I’m cur­rently dos­ing with audio­books and films rec­om­mended on lovefilm.

Any­way. This is just to say — to my one reader (and myself, if I am not that reader) — that I think it’s about time I stopped this non­sense (blog­ging, fol­low­ing, tweet­ing — gen­er­ally drown­ing in a soup of trivia) and got on with some seri­ous liv­ing. I can see my for­ti­eth birth­day loom­ing over the next hill, and while I feel — and act — like a small child, the fact of the mat­ter is that sig­nif­i­cant num­bers of oth­ers don’t. And those oth­ers get pub­lish­ing deals, or become VAT reg­is­tered, or sim­ply learn to be happy dis­con­nected — untainted by the ephemera of other people’s lives. I need to busy with myself, not the lives of others.

So, let’s see how it goes. See you when this/the next novel is complete.